Posted
by
timothy
on Friday June 18, 2010 @05:47AM
from the 5th-time's-the-charm dept.

GMGruman writes "Someone at Microsoft either really loves mobile operating systems or can't make up his mind as to which to use, because Microsoft Thursday announced yet another mobile OS, its fifth. The new Windows Embedded Handheld OS will succeed Windows Mobile 6.5 and run on at least some existing Windows Mobile smartphones. It is not the same mobile OS, known as Windows Phone 7, that Microsoft earlier this year said would replace Windows Mobile and break with it in terms of compatibility so Microsoft could better compete with the iPhone and Google Android OS."

So, they'll have Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Windows Embedded Compact 7, Windows Embedded Handheld... and the only one that sounds okay won't be out until November at the earliest, whereas the 3 others are lame pieces of crap.Who, by the way, comes up with these names? Can you possibly make Windows Embedded Compact Handheld Mobile Phone 8 or something and combine all of the awesome features into one package... or will we just have to settle for iOS 4.x?

There are very few changes to the various versions of Android, so you can ignore fragmentation and target 1.5 and pretty much everyone will be able to run it. The addition of wifi tethering, apps to sd etc in 2.2 makes no difference at all to users of 2.1,1.6,1.5 etc.

According to the article, Windows Embedded Handheld replaces Windows Mobile, and it is built on Windows Embedded Compact 7 the way Ubuntu is built on Linux and X11. This makes two operating systems (Windows Phone 7 and Windows EH) for handheld devices such as phones, PDAs, and handheld barcode scanners. But compare to Google's own mobile operating systems Chrome OS and Android.

So would this be a fair assessment for someone familiar with the current product lineup?

1. WEC7 is a rebranding/retread of Windows CE 6. There will be industrial PDAs using it like the MC55, Psion Ikon, DAPtech etc
2. WEH is basically the Windows Mobile shell on top of WEC7, just as WM6 was the shell on top of CE5. In theory it should be possible to recompile/port existing C++ codebases and will be a useful upgrade path for large corporations who currently run their bespoke stocktaking/delivery/survey applications on top of WM6.
3. Windows Phone 7 is a completely new offering built on the WEC7 kernel. It has a locked-down userland aimed at being flashy for the consumer market which cannot run native code (and is useless if you have 8 years of C++ codebase you want to run on it).

A: Right now, the only development language supported is C#. Developers are also interested in Visual Basic, C++ and other.Net apps, Kindel acknowledged, and Microsoft may add support for these over time. But Microsoft's development str

So would this be a fair assessment for someone familiar with the current product lineup?

1. WEC7 is a rebranding/retread of Windows CE 6. There will be industrial PDAs using it like the MC55, Psion Ikon, DAPtech etc2. WEH is basically the Windows Mobile shell on top of WEC7, just as WM6 was the shell on top of CE5. In theory it should be possible to recompile/port existing C++ codebases and will be a useful upgrade path for large corporations who currently run their bespoke stocktaking/delivery/survey applications on top of WM6.3. Windows Phone 7 is a completely new offering built on the WEC7 kernel. It has a locked-down userland aimed at being flashy for the consumer market which cannot run native code (and is useless if you have 8 years of C++ codebase you want to run on it).

That list also gives one a glimpse of what is wrong with Windows Mobile in general. It is clunky, unintuitive and fragmented. It seems I can't pick up two phones purportedly running the same version of the same Windows Mobile OS and use the same procedure to configure half the things I want to. Some time ago I configured a HTC S620 smartphone to work over a a VPN connection. It took quite a while to figure out the clunky UI and the badly documented process needed to accomplish this (Mostly HTC's fault for writing a crappy manual) but it worked fine in the end. Recently the thing broke down and I was provided with another type of HTC smartphone of the same vintage running the same OS version but the configuration process was totally different. Although it usually ends up working OK if you have the patience to do battle with the UI and read the (often) crappy user manual, I passionately hate setting up and configuring Windows Mobile.

one that sounds okay won't be out until November at the earliest, whereas the 3 others are lame pieces of crap.

If I were betting, I'd bet the one coming out in Nov will be a lame piece of crap, too. If a roofer does a shitty job on the first three roofs, do you expect him to get the fourth roof right?

Microsoft does sometimes improve, though -- Win 7 is (marginally) better than XP IMO, though they went backwards with search and control panel; both are far less useable. I still prefer Mandrake (yes, from seve

Microsoft can't come up with - and stick to - a good name to save their life, but that's not the real issue. Despite the shall-we-say limited adoption of their legacy smartphone OS (WinCE/PocketPC/WinMobile), there's a pretty substantial installed base of vertical-market apps and users of those apps. (Even Apple was stuck using it for a while in their stores, before they started making their own handhelds.) MS needs to compete with iOS and Android and WebOS in terms of functionality, and that means somet

It's one thing to criticize a product. We here on slashdot do it all the time. In the case of the iPhone, Ballmer boldy predicted [usatoday.com] that "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share." It only took a year for the iPhone to exceed WinMobile's marketshare. Three years later, WinMobile's share is in a downward spiral while iPhone and Android gain. If you read the full article, Ballmer also quotes facts are figures which turn out to be wrong. It reminds me more of the Iraqi Minister of Information more than anything else.

I was at D8, and I can tell you Ballmer was laughed at too. By midway through his interview, everyone within three rows were murmuring or giggling to each other. I heard the world delusional used several times. It was surreal watching the head of MS seem to be so so out of touch. But specifically, when he criticized Google for having two OS products, people guffawed. The group around me started counting how many MS currently has, and we figured around 5-6. MS needs Ballmer gone.

Windows Phone 7 is the only upgrade path. There is no clear hardware path, so all users can do is wait for the next gen.
But the profit split is neat via the "enterprise" idea.
A low end 'first hit is almost free' idea for the Sidekick generation.
Now you have the enterprise idea of costumer retention via proprietary data storage.
The "reliability and security features" will so protect your data you will have no option but to stay with MS.

It's an embedded devices OS, like WindowsCE. Still annoyed at Microsoft for dropping support for.NET Compact Framework from the new Visual Studio 2008. I hope this one will support CF or I'm going to have a whole lot of soon-to-be unsupported handhelds on my hands

Although Nokia also have Maemo, which is Linux:) And note that whilst Symbian isn't Unix, it is open source which I think deserves some credit (not that you ever hear about it on Slashdot - once upon a time, Slashdot would focus on open source even when they were less popular; now, the open source platforms get ignored in place of closed locked down platforms, even when the open source one has vastly more market share).

Although Nokia also have Maemo, which is Linux:) And note that whilst Symbian isn't Unix, it is open source which I think deserves some credit (not that you ever hear about it on Slashdot - once upon a time, Slashdot would focus on open source even when they were less popular; now, the open source platforms get ignored in place of closed locked down platforms, even when the open source one has vastly more market share).

And then you'd have to add iOS as "open source" as well, because well, it runs on top of

Reading these stories about MS lately is making me all nostalgic for when what they did mattered. I can't quite put my finger on it... but at some point they lost their big and scary status.. and have just become more of a joke.. to me at least. There was a time when their whims could shift the whole market.. these days I wonder if the masses even notice their flailing attempts to 'compete'.

I know when that was - it was when the big Unix vendors decided that you had to buy the very expensive kit and software then allowed you to have, if you bought a large support contract and training to manage their overly-expensive bloated stuff. Then this little upstart company was selling PCs that did most of what the big guys were doing but at a significantly lower price and with a lot more flexibility over what you could or could not do with your IT system.

How times have changed!

(Ok, there was a time in the middle when their stuff wasn't that good, but you still wanted it - ad every time an upgrade came out, you knew you had to have it because it would fix a load of problems with the software. Today that time is pretty much gone, unless you've bought sharepoint, so no-one really feels the need to grab the upgrade immediately)

Computers are just part of life for everybody now.
I think MS lost it with the DRM in Vista and Win 7.
The 360 640p discovery, sidekick ect just keep the sad news flowing with every next generation they enter.
DRM and threats to the emerging digital market where and are real.

Yeah, it's interesting isn't it. I think it's because it's become clear that the kind of big-ticket software that Microsoft has built itself on just isn't where the real money's going to be in a few years. It's reached a peak complexity-wise, features-wise, and usefulness-wise. Instead, collaborative service software (i.e. Google) will be the way a lot of businesses go, and consumers will go with small, cheap, and cheerful (i.e. the Apple App Store), and social network type stuff (Facebook and its successors). Portability is where it's at, and Microsoft has missed so many beats it can't catch up, especially because it means essentially cannibalising they big-ticket software business.

I'm a little wary of this trend, even though I can definitely see its value. I'm a heavy user of said big-ticket software myself (Adobe products mostly), and I don't want to see it stagnate. That said, I think it's pretty stagnant already, and needs a serious shake-up. Microsoft and Adobe's products are absurdly complex and bloated these days; there simply has to be a simpler way. And a cheaper way too!

Yeah, it's interesting isn't it. I think it's because it's become clear that the kind of big-ticket software that Microsoft has built itself on just isn't where the real money's going to be in a few years. It's reached a peak complexity-wise, features-wise, and usefulness-wise. Instead, collaborative service software (i.e. Google) will be the way a lot of businesses go, and consumers will go with small, cheap, and cheerful (i.e. the Apple App Store), and social network type stuff (Facebook and its successors). Portability is where it's at, and Microsoft has missed so many beats it can't catch up, especially because it means essentially cannibalising they big-ticket software business.

I think you're spot on in your analysis of where the consumer market is heading but when it comes to the business side of things office life is still dominated by standard desktop / laptop computing using big ticket software for most workers. I don't come across many businesses in my line of work where users don't have a desktop or laptop running Windows and Office in addition to one or more big ticket industry specific software applications with the one large noticable exception being the health-care industry where more and more providers are moving to tablets, which for doctors and nurses who aren't stationary makes perfect sense.

I admit I don't know much about how large businesses are run (never worked for one!), so you might be right. Although, I suspect startups will move to software-as-service, and will stick with it as they get big.

The big now problem seems to be how you collaborate on stuff, and shift information around, not number of features in an office suite. That's gotta hurt Microsoft in the long run (right?).

MS were big in the desktop/PC market - and they still are. They still shift this market.

MS aren't so big in phones - and they never have been (not that I see a problem with that - Apple are happy being number 3 in smartphone OSs and number 6 or so in terms of phones; MS might not be number 1, but neither are Apple here, as long as MS make extra money from it, that's all that matters).

If you mean that Apple get far more hype, well if anything, that's more a change for A

I know of and heard of many many Windows PocketPC, Mobile, etc users who have dumped Windows on the handheld device because of how poor the platform is. So those who have tried and paid the price know how poorly they've done in these segments. But, there are millions more who only know Microsoft Windows on the desktop and to most of them, Microsoft is 'the computer' so they are ripe for the picking with the right marketing campaign.One of the great things about the success of the iPhone has been that people

I think your post is indicative of what's holding Microsoft back. The whole ground is shifting, and it's Apple and Google that have managed to move into (or even create) this new world, and Microsoft has not.

Here's what I think a lot of people think the "computing" landscape will look like in a few years: most people will have a phone or iPad-like device instead of a laptop or desktop computer. They will probably dock with a big screen and keyboard for serious work. Most documents will be held in 'the cloud', with local cache. The software to work on them will either be web-based or small and cheap.

This trend will be most noticeable in developing markets, where people will use their phones for what rich countries were using desktop PCs for up until now. For example, in Africa I noticed huge numbers of people have phones (not the latest and greatest, but not old crap either), but virtually no one owned their own PC. They will probably skip the PC step altogether, because in a year or two their phones will do most of what they would find useful in a PC anyway. They will go to Wifi hotspots and use their phones, in much the same way as they go to internet cafes now.

Apple is obviously a major contender (and driver) of this landscape. Google too.

Microsoft will retain its stranglehold on (some) business for quite a while, but that will be seen as a small part of a much larger marketplace. It will continue to exist and make money for a long time to come, but it won't have much pull over the general direction of computing.

It's not "what is holding Microsoft back, it's "who", as the parent suggests. Ballmer is simply a disaster as a CEO. I'm surprised the board hasn't ended his tenure, which they should have done after the (fortunately for Microsoft) attempt to buy Yahoo. (Jerry Yang has to be one of the worst tech CEOs ever for not taking the deal.)

Look at Apple - A succession of mediocre CEOs after Jobs, then Jobs comes back to create great a great company again. It's not the company, really, its the leadership. Ballmer

If this Microsoft operating system is going to be incompatible with the other Microsoft operating systems, why not just switch to something else now and be done with it? Compatibility is the only advantage Microsoft software has, and that is being thrown out with the bathwater.

Windows Mobile looks like crap, and they know it. They maintained compatibility above all else, and the result is that you can use most of the familiar Windows API on it, and make all your apps look like tiny desktop apps. They worked but weren't very intuitive, especially in the new world of touch. Because of this, "Windows Phone 7" was announced as a completely incompatible OS, supporting only Silverlight apps. It's meant to be the next-gen platform that can compete with the slickness of the iPhone.

The problem is that Windows Mobile had a lot of business users and they weren't too happy with everything they make and use becoming obsolete overnight. That's the void this fills. This "Windows Embedded Handheld" maintains the compatibility platform they bought into.

I suspect the only difference between the two will be that one uses the old shell and one uses the new Silverlight shell -- it's already easy to confirm that Windows Phone 7 uses a similar (if not the same) platform underneath the new UI.

For a Windows user, there is a LOT you can do with a WinMo 5-6.5 device with little/no effort - no need for custom (and very expensive) vendored products.

For instance, hooking up an RFID scanner to a WinMo phone or PDA, and automagically putting your data into a (desktop) Office-compatible spreadsheet, running totals, adding input, etc. as you go is dead simple (particularly if you've got an older, better non-capacitive screen). You can then just copy the file back over to your desktop, macros and all, and

For instance, hooking up an RFID scanner to a WinMo phone or PDA, and automagically putting your data into a (desktop) Office-compatible spreadsheet, running totals, adding input, etc. as you go is dead simple (particularly if you've got an older, better non-capacitive screen). You can then just copy the file back over to your desktop, macros and all, and work on it there unchanged.

You might be a happier person if you just used your phone to play angry birds or koi pond instead of whatever it was that you j

The version of the article on engadget (here [engadget.com]) seems a little more informative:

"We're starting to see that philosophy play out today with the introduction of Windows Embedded Handheld, which is essentially a warmed-over version of WinMo 6.5.3 with some key UI and enterprise-focused enhancements. Microsoft is specifically calling out an "extended support life-cycle" for the platform, a sign that these phones aren't for the gotta-have-it crowd -- instead, the company intends to push these things through corporate fleets where Windows Mobile has traditionally dominated, places where Windows Phone's flashy stylings and locked-down underpinnings won't have the same draw."

And the saddest thing is that even though it's Window Mobile 6.5, it's really Windows Mobile 5 with a series of minor changes. Basically it's been 5+ years since MS has done any real work on their mobile OS.

to me this reads like microsoft is in the same pickle that palm was in when smartphones first started up.

back then they had the problem that their current palmos (garnet) was running into a brick wall in terms of capabilities. They had a more updated version available (cobalt) but no one wanted it as it was not compatible with the library of third party garnet software that was out there.

basically, 6.5 looks like someone crammed desktop windows onto a phone. Microsoft wants to get a ground up rethink of the

You're making the false assumption that it's the market that decides what operating systems are available on smart phones. Hate to break it to you, but all cell phones are a terribly proprietary business with a huge barrier to entry, and if all of the present players decide that shit is the best thing to run on smart phones then that is what will run on smart phones, even if there exist holy open alternatives that will save babies from being eaten.

"Standards compliant" does not mean "standards efficient". Try to get around iOS Safari's lack of Flash vector animation by making a JavaScript vector animation player that uses HTML5 <canvas>, and you could end up with a slideshow. Does iOS Safari even support data URIs passed to an <audio> element for JavaScript synthesis?

Yes, as an iPhone user I'm very sad that the annoying animations I see using my regular browser (including the IBM ads on/., which make me want to pay IBM $$$ to thank them) are not available on my phone.

You might think Homestar Runner, Weebl and Bob, and Magical Trevor are annoying, but a lot of other people disagree with you.

If the OS is good enough, one of the phone device manufacturers will leverage that advantage to make a larger profit over the others.

That's like saying that the RIAA will be happy to sell music without DRM. It doesn't matter how good the distribution system (ie the OS in this case), they will still want to try and lock it down. Which is exactly what the phone companies do. They try to lock the phones they sell down to stop you tethering or even using SIMs from other Telcos, etc.

This is slowly changing, but don't act like they would jump on an open system just because it was technically proficient and fun to use. They would add in a whole

Like I said, it's changing slowly, but they're going to be dragged kicking and screaming the whole way. You're right that anyone with a decent service and products can make a killing, but like someone else said there's a really high barrier to entry too. It took the iPhone to even make phone designers start trying to design proper touch interfaces despite touch phones being out for years prior. The whole software and services side of the mobile market has been crap for the last 20 years, the only decent imp

The Market does decide, why do you think Android and iOS are leading the pack when it comes to growth?

Presumably because they're the newest - a platform starting from nothing is going to see larger growth in relative terms. And it's not like there are many platforms in the phone market. For Nokia, they have Symbian at 50% of the market - it's hard to push further when you're already number one.

And remember - when we say Nokia are at 50%, that's not total phones ever shipped, that's still based on current sa

Nokia is the company issuing profit warnings at the moment. Nokia realises, as much as if not more than Apple, that the dumbphone market and the low end smartphone and 'feature'-phone markets are not terribly profitable. Don't get me wrong, Nokia is still a dangerous competitor, and in a market this young, things can change overnight, so the early leaders could find themselves increaingly pegged back. But Nokia's current position is more of a crutch.

As somebody who is getting increasing pressure to support iOS in a (relatively secured) corporate environment, I can tell you that it is anything BUT standards compliant.

Try connecting one to an authenticated proxy. Looks like it works doesn't it? Well it doesn't. Inexplicably half of the outbound packets bypass the proxy and run smack into our firewall. This is for normal port 80 traffic. Or how about how the Youtube app sends a 'Host:' header pointing to gdata.youtube.com, but the requested url is actual

Exactly - the problem is not a lack of open OS solutions, the problem is that phone manufacturers and contract vendors want their own locks in place to stop people, for instance, only buying content once then easily taking it with them from phone to phone, or sharing data with people on other phones, or using their phone data package with their laptop, or any of the millions of other ways we could be better enjoying the technology if it didn't impinge on their given right to gouge us for functionality that

As an N900 owner: do NOT try an N900. Nokia are even worse than Microsoft in terms of supporting their products. N900's Maemo OS is already outdated, and the N900 along with it. They must have been planning to do that even before releasing the N900, given the timelines, which is why you get people posting friendly advice to Nokia on how it can avoid death [arcticstartup.com].

Nokia seem to think of their phones and OS's like Casio thinks of watches: a simple, closed-loop device that's done as soon as it hits the shelves. Fo

No, you got bugfixes that essentially brought it out of beta status months after it was released. On the same day, you saw the first release of Meego, their new system, which Nokia have clearly said that they will NOT properly support on the N900. The work to fix major bugs was essentially just a woefully inadequate fairwell gesture. A full, supported meego release with potential for another 2 years of app compatibility for the N900 might have been a less stupid gesture.

The only thing Nokia has going for it is Qt, which they bought in from Trolltech (along with TT itself), and they'll probably find a way to kill.

Qt is now their standard development kit for Symbian and Maemo, so to suggest they only bought it to kill it is false. And as a new learner on Symbian, I have to say I'm very impressed. Qt looks to be a very good API. It's also cross-platform, not only meaning the same code will compile for Symbian and Maemo, but also making it easy to develop for Windows, Mac and Linux (so you can pretty much compile for 100% of the desktop market, and 50% of the mobile market). And it means you can use standard C++, where as the old development kit for Symbian apparently used an awkward cut down version.

And as for "only thing Nokia has going for it", there's more to Nokia than Maemo. Like the small matter of their other OS with 50% market share, or the hundreds of millions of phones they sell every year. Never used an N900, but I love my 5800.

In fact your entire post seems to be extrapolating from the single point of "Maemo is discontinued". By all means warn the OP, but your claims about how they therefore kill all their phones, OSs, and SDKs, is just plain ludicrous. Symbian has been around for many years. You might as well claim that because Apple have ditched their Mac OS before (not to mention 68K, PPC), that therefore they're about to ditch OS X or IphoneOS at any moment!

I didn't suggest that at all. Clearly they bought it with the intent of using it to build a good cross-platform SDK solution for their phones. What I did suggest was that they'll probably kill it anyway, despite their good intentions, because they're completely clueless about what developers and users want from modern smartphone platform.

If you take the time to read the article and comments I linked to above, you'll see others explaining the same problem, and an ex-nokia staff member explaining that Nokia are aware of the problem, acknowledge it internally, know what they need to do to fix it, but just can't get it done because of company structures.

I think that there is a difference in the "lifespan" metric you two are using:

Carpetshark says that Nokia products have shit lifespans; because he is talking about the "lifespan" of a hardware product during which it continues to be updated to the latest software features(within the bounds of hardware limitations. For a pricey computer-in-a-cellphone-box like the N900, that isn't at all unreasonable, nor is Nokia's record in the area exactly unblemished.

I am also an N900 owner.While Meego won't be officially supported on the N900, it's worth noting that the N900 remains the reference platform for it. Additionally, the community support for Maemo is unbelievably good; I wouldn't be surprised at all if the N900 port of Meego remains an active community project for years. This is partly because most of the people who own N900s are geeks, and because the N900 is completely open (there are a plethora of custom kernels available for use on it).tldr: Having a com

The N900 uses an old type of touch screen that can't do multitouch (properly). Meego uses multitouch as an everyday input method.

There's already a Meego alpha available for the N900, but there's no UI (just a shell).

Almost. Meego is available for Netbooks, but Nokia released "Meego Core" for the N900, not "Meego". Honestly, individual skilled hackers have released more of android for N900 so far. Nokia have said that they're not supporting N900 because it's not an open hardware

Now see. I just don't get this. I can totally see the iOS vs Android thing. There is little doubt that both are very usable device operating systems devised for the specific needs of a very small screen and limited input options. I'm currently using an iPhone, but realistically I think I'd be just as happy with an Android phone. My iPhone preference is about half "I find it really usable" and about half "I don't feel like changing carriers and AT&T's Android offerings suck". I've also played a bit

Android is 100% open source. Don't like the Market? Replace it. Don't like the keyboard? Replace it. Don't like Google integrations? Remove them.

If you think all of this is somehow difficult or discouraged, I think you should take a closer look at the forums at xda-developers.com, or even at developer.android.com, where you can check out the entire OS source code with git and re-build it from scratch and re-flash your phone, if you want.

All this talk about Jailbreaking Android phones is for people who want root access but *DO NOT* want to re-flash their phone. There is no such problem for people that are comfortable replacing the software. And in fact this is what you have to do with most open source projects running on specialized hardware.

Flashing a rom doesn't make your job as a bot creator easier. You can already write whever you want on an Android phone. And the networks are already in control of bandwidth regardless of the rom. So I don't understand your point.

The carriers are moving from "all you can eat" to limited data plans anyway. If they're still overselling capacity they don't have in a model where theoretically everyone knows exactly how much they're entitled to, that's their own problem - either increase prices and improve infrastructure or reduce the maximum data limits and stop promising people something that can't be delivered.

If you think all of this is somehow difficult or discouraged, I think you should take a closer look at the forums at xda-developers.com, or even at developer.android.com, where you can check out the entire OS source code with git and re-build it from scratch and re-flash your phone, if you want.

... and lose you warranty in the process. Also you can remove limitation introduced by Google, but removing limitation introduced by your mobile provider could end-up into a contract violation (like tethering).
On a practical point of view, Android has made jailbreaking easier than the iPhone. For a developer, that's great, for a joe user the main issues (warranty and contract) are still the same unfortunately.

We only have one half of what make Linux great on the PC. We have a OSS OS, but we lack the har

No, Android is an open source client for the Android Market. Download a copy of "open source" Android and you'll soon find that you can't actually use it much because Market isn't available in the open source version. Essentially every copy has to be given a key by Google to make it work, and that only happens on approved hardware. It's just software licensing by another name. Otherwise, I'd gladly install it on my Nokia and never look back.

Unless I'm missing something, what you're suggesting is the opposite of replace the market - it's replacing the entire OS but trying to still use the market? The original point was, anyone can come along and write their own market app for Android, so even if the official one won't work with your Android flavour of choice, you can easily roll your own (of course it likely won't get far without either excellent marketing skills or a big budget, but that's an issue of product promotion in general and not limit

To replace the market SOFTWARE, you would need access to the market data. Otherwise, you're starting from scratch. But the data is locked down. Often these days, given the lock-in created by having all your friends or apps in one system, open source is a secondary concern, next to open data and openly accessible APIs. Anyone can make a facebook client, even if the source isn't available, but making that facebook client work with facebook without an (un-locked) API, or making a better, more open version

I hazard a guess that 99% - no, 99.9995% of the Android user base has NO INTEREST in hacking their handset from its factory installed presets.

Apple with their iOS and Palm with their WebOS knew this full well, which is why they designed their UIs to be completely user-friendly from the time the device is first switched on to the time it's given away to a family member as you update your device.

Androids hackability has nothing to do with its market prevalence - it just happens to be installed on loads of dev

There are disagrees of closedness. I don't really mind the OS itself being proprietary (I probably should, though), I do mind a lot when my content (media and apps) is in a proprietary format, or, worse, DRMed, and when the distribution channels are censored.

you can have DRMed content on an "open" OS.. I'd rather have the contray, but even better, open content on an open OS, indeed. We should not condemn all "closed" things indiscriminately though, there are degrees of closedness.